Podcast Monday (11/27/2023)
This Week’s Favorites:
Reinventing Community College with Tade Oyerinde (Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist)
Cost isn't really the problem with community college. The major like problem with community college, I describe in two ways: it's quality and completion, which is kind of a child or derivative of quality. Only about 30% of students who go to community college will ever graduate with an associate's degree or transfer into a four year school and get a bachelor's degree. They're all dropping out…The reality is that most of the community colleges sort of have this traditional notion of sort of sink or swim, it's all up to you. They don't really treat students like their customers and they don't have the resources to basically do what we in Silicon Valley call customer support.
Generally speaking, if you get a bachelor's degree you're going to out earn people with just a high school diploma by about a million dollars over the course of your life. Associate degree gets you about half the value so about half a million dollars over the course of your life. The key really is ROI so an associate’s degree is a no-brainer if you can get one for free.
We've also noticed this broader trend of students, young people, even their parents just getting disillusioned with higher ed and there's a massive problem with the way people perceive the quality of community college education. The thought experiment that I always tell people is just imagine you're a high school senior on admitted students day—remember admitted students day where everyone wears the hoodie of the school they're going to—nobody wants to be the kid wearing the local community college hoodie, like you were too dumb to go to a four year school. That's the way people perceive it even though for I'd say at least half of students in America today, community college is the clever path. It's the smart path, it's way better even with the lower graduation rates than getting into debt to go to a tier three four year college.
Keith Rabois on LaBossiere Podcast
Peter Thiel has had this philosophy since the first day I worked for him in 2000 when he taught me the importance of building companies based upon undiscovered talent. He explained while we were jogging around the Stanford campus that you can’t build a company successfully with talent that other people know how to assess.
I don't like excuses. If you don't accept excuses you wind up in much better places so when I interview people any excuse is a yellow flag, if they're senior it's a red flag immediately. I literally track everybody in my life by number of excuses I've ever heard from them and it's extraordinarily predictive of what happens in their life.
You shouldn’t stretch—there’s now research that supports that. Everybody used to think I was crazy. It’s horrible. One is opportunity cost simply about time allocation—let’s say you take 10 minutes stretching what could you do otherwise? And almost every catastrophic injury—think ACL tear—is a hyperextension injury so the more flexible you are the more likely you have a catastrophic injury. Unless you’re a true elite athlete still competing the worst thing you can do in your life is have a catastrophic injury. Any performance degradation at like 1% because you’re a little inflexible is not worth incremental risk to an ACL tear.
Andrew Wilkinson on My First Million (#521)
A lot of people forget that small things can get big.
If you ask the dinner guest what’s for dinner they will always say steak.
In 2016 I was reading a profile on Dan Gilbert…He's the Quicken Loans, Rocket Mortgage guy. It was an all about how he'd taken his entire fortune and basically was trying to rebuild the city of Detroit. And I thought that was really cool. I thought, you know, you see all these guys who get super rich, and then they put their money into like mutual funds, right? I think that's incredibly boring. This guy's trying to rebuild the city. He's buying skyscrapers. He's starting all these businesses. So I just cold emailed him at one in the morning. And I said hey, here's three bullets about me. And I thought about what is he interested in. I mentioned that I own that bakery. I mentioned I'm passionate about my city. I mentioned I bootstrapped my business, you know, tried to find a few points of similarity, and said, I would love to meet you anytime, anywhere, I will fly to you just tell me when we could meet. And I got an email response back like 20 minutes later saying sure. And we ended up meeting up in Detroit and he was amazing. We spent an afternoon together, gave me a tour of the city, got to know a whole bunch of people on his team. And it was awesome. So I will shoot shots like that when I see someone that I'm interested in.
You're willing to spend money, you're willing to hop on the flight, you're willing to buy the charity thing, you're willing to be a part of their program that they're launching because you know they care about that right now. Everybody sort of understands that having a valuable network is valuable, but very few people are willing to invest because it's not a clear dollars in dollars out thing.
I love to hire people based on scrappiness. Will they figure things out? Will they learn? Do they have high pace? I've never hired someone who doesn't have high pace and then coached them into having high pace. People either do or they don't.
If you're a plane taking off from New York, you change three degrees and that was the difference between ending up in Seattle versus Tijuana. I think that same thing is true in a company.
Erin Matson Interview with Jones Angell
This year’s team—it wasn’t about the hockey at all—it was the journey that they went through to come together and to believe and lead each other on the field and off the field and have conversations that most college athletes don’t have…I just played with them, I was just going out with them, I was living with them. It took a very special group and what they did off the field to prepare themselves and grow into the leaders and people they became this season, it’s crazy.
This team, yes they won a national championship, yes they did something that people thought they couldn’t do, but they’ve also changed the game in America forever. You don’t hear sold out and field hockey in the same sentence. You don’t hear 3200 fans uttered in the same breath as a field hockey match. And they can say they’ve done something no one has done before in terms of getting more eyes on the sport and getting more people caring about our sport.